MX Logic, Blue Coat Team On Web Security

MX Logic is enlisting Blue Coat hardware and software to provide two new managed services: Threat Control, which protects against spyware, adware, viruses and phishing scams, and Content Control, which allows companies to block employees from accessing inappropriate or non-business-related Web sites, said Steve Renda, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Denver-based MX Logic.

The move reflects MX Logic's desire to branch out beyond its traditional focus on providing managed e-mail security services to small and midsize businesses, Renda added. "This is HTTP protection as opposed to SMTP protection," he said.

Though Threat Control is more of a mission-critical service, Content Control is the type of service that is rapidly gaining notice as companies seek to regulate the use of bandwidth, according to Rick Adams, vice president of corporate development at PC Solutions, a Minneapolis-based solution provider.

"We actually have customers who have had incidents and are willing to spend on a service to minimize their risk," Adams said.

Blue Coat, Sunnyvale, Calif., is moving beyond its enterprise focus to court more SMB customers, and partnering with MX Logic will go a long way toward helping to achieve that goal, Renda said.

Although Blue Coat has traditionally delivered its technology in appliance form, the company's technology translates well as a managed service, Renda noted.

"MX Logic saw this as an opportunity to take technology that's battle-tested to the SMB market and wrap our interface around it and make it easy to use," he said.

John Stubbs, vice president of Alternative Technology, a value-added distributor in Englewood, Colo., that sells MX Logic and Blue Coat products, said WebDefense is basically Blue Coat's enterprise-focused technology packaged into a managed service for the SMB market. However, none of the functionality has been removed, he noted.

MX Logic, which has about 12,000 customers and 1.2 million seats, gets roughly two-thirds of its revenue from the channel, but the company plans to boost that number to 100 percent by the end of 2007, according to Renda.